


Poetic License

by rachelindeed



Category: Cabin Pressure, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 12:54:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4747184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/pseuds/rachelindeed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm tucking away poems and drabbles here.  Mostly Sherlock Holmes, a bit of Cabin Pressure.  Includes:</p><p>Watson and Wilfred Owen<br/>Holmes writing sonnets<br/>A meditation on dead canaries<br/>My dot of air is nothing like a line</p><p>FOR MORE HOLMES READERS: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes poem, "A meditation on dead canaries," can be found at Chapter Four.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Exposure & A Terre

**Author's Note:**

> The italicized text represents excerpts from Wilfred Owen's poems [Exposure](http://europeanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/blowenexposure.htm) and [A Terre](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/248356). All rights belong to his estate.

**Exposure  
**

_Our brains ache  
_

John can’t think in this room. The beige walls and starched sheets make him imagine empty spaces behind his skin. That can’t be healthy.

_Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent_

He can’t sleep in the absence of sound. Barracks life was never quiet. And those months in hospital had sandpapered his senses, rubbed them raw with the sounds of monitors and moans and vomiting. The noises of war and sickness are folded into his subconscious. In their absence, his brain triggers alarms.

_Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient_

It’s normal, in cases of traumatic injury, for key memories to blank out. Details jumble together, stretches of time disappear and the reality of pain stays hazy in hindsight.

It’s a simple self-defense mechanism, this feeling that he’s a stranger in his own head.

_Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,_

_But nothing happens._

Harry doesn’t know how to talk to him, never did. She notices, though, that he doesn’t call any old friends, doesn’t look up classmates to network for rooms or jobs or even a round at the pub. She knows enough to know he doesn’t want to be questioned, but her worries spill out anyway, not always kindly. She spends a lot of time on the phone, but always lowers her voice and rings off when he walks in.

When he tells her he’s leaving, she hands him her mobile.

_Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,_

_Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles._

His nerves are strung tight. His body is braced for blows that don’t come but are not therefore imaginary. He carries the cane but never concedes to it.

_Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,_

_Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war._

_What are we doing here?_

John sees clips of Kandahar on telly and watches surgery on the hospital soaps in between endless rounds of cooking shopping gossip crap. His eyes drift away from the screen. His fingers feel perfectly still against the remote until he glances down at them and finds they’re shaking.

_The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow_

_We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy._

_Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army_

_Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey_

How could he have forgotten the texture of London rains so quickly? The shadow of clouds painting patterns across old stone – he used to dream of this in the desert. This city is the only place on Earth with enough shades of gray to fit him.  He can’t afford to stay, of course.

_But nothing happens._

“Nothing happens to me,” John says.

~~

**A Terre**

_Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall._

_My fingers fidget like ten idle brats._

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t shake hands to say hello, he borrows phones. His fingers blur across the keys but his thoughts move faster. There’s not a scrap of patience in him, not a hint of tact. He is the one moving point in John’s fixed world, and John follows him instinctively.

_Spring wind would work its own way to my lung,_

_And grow me legs as quick as lilac-shoots._

Sherlock takes off after the cab, and John is only a step behind. The rush of air as he jumps the roof seems to kick-start his whole body. Adrenaline wipes his mind clear; there’s only pounding feet and flashing coat and braking cab and oops, wrong suspect.

As they tramp back to the flat, John pats at his jacket pocket, vaguely sensing he’s forgotten something.

_Microbes have their joys,_

_And subdivide, and never come to death_

Sherlock Holmes is a little bit sick, John decides.

History with drugs: unexpected.

Eyes in the microwave: hmm.

“Why would she still be upset?”: problem.

Climbing into cab with serial killer: stupid.

And now he’s holding a white pill to the light: sick.

John is a doctor.

_Your guns may crash around me. I'll not hear;_

_Or, if I wince, I shall not know I wince._

His hand is steady. His conscience clear so far as he can judge. He pulls the trigger and nothing in him shrinks. He ducks below the window sash, crouching out of eye-line, but that’s instinct, not shame.

_Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,_

_But here the thing's best left at home with friends._

They grab some takeaway Chinese. Back home, they decide not to bother clearing off the kitchen table and instead sit cross-legged on the floor. John empirically proves that Sherlock cannot deduce the content of fortune cookies with any better than 50% accuracy. Sherlock steals his egg roll in retaliation.

_Carry my crying spirit till it's weaned_

_To do without what blood remained these wounds_

“Everything else is transport,” Sherlock tells him.

Sherlock finds it easy – natural – to forget his body, and around him John is able to do the same. His leg is no longer a weight dragging behind him, the scar along his shoulder cannot stop his arm from rising to its work. To Sherlock’s work. 

John misses the war, he's told.  But no. This is not the same.

It's better.


	2. Art in the blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Filtering Sherlock's perspective through Shakespeare. (Some of the phrases are Doyle's, and 'unseemly stains' is Keats's).

Art in the blood is liable to take

the strangest forms. The light within my veins

glares harsh as noon, my mind ever awake.

Men’s shades and secrets, their unseemly stains,

pass ceaselessly before my inner eye.

I learnt to find the beauty in such sights,

And seeking such, grew blind even to thy

more shadowed fractures and more perfect heights.

I thought thee, first, conductor of my light,

Reflecting only what my brilliance wrought;

Yet thou hast lit for me the path to right,

And changed the very color of my thought.

Mine age hath found its fixéd point in you.

Thou art vastly improbable, and true.


	3. John Watson: His Limits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock's perspective funneled through Shakespeare.

It’s plain to see he knows nothing of crime

(except for war and all its lurid dead).

The pathless deserts of a foreign clime

have overwritten London in his head.

His nerves are shot, his sinew will not serve

(except to clap a killer in arrest).

He babbles of the credit I deserve –

his manner does not seem to be in jest.

He hardly ever speaks a word of sense

(except to praise the gifts that others mock).

He offers me friendship without pretense.

He has, in short, been something of a shock.

No doubt quite soon I’ll get his limits set;

his novelty will wear off. But not yet.


	4. A meditation on dead canaries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watson's reflections on the events of "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes." Contains major spoilers for the film. Posted for Watson's Woes July Writing Prompts 2015, prompt: yellow.

You have been telling me for years  
that I have no imagination.  
And yet, now that the case,  
her parasol, your heart  
is closed,  
I find myself reflecting on dead birds.

I see those poor canaries,   
bleached bone white,  
struck dead for having ventured deep  
into an unknown sea and breathed  
the poisoned fumes that all too often  
mix with mad invention.

It may be,  
some near or distant day,  
the same end to adventure  
shall be hers, or yours,  
or mine.

But, I must tell you,  
thinking now on white, still feathers,  
I have already died so.  
I have been bleached by desert,  
and by pain,  
struck down for having ventured deep  
into an unknown land and borne  
the poisoned wounds that all too often  
finish war's intention.

I am not finished.

You told me once that art within the blood  
is liable to take the strangest forms.  
I think perhaps my own has tinted gold,  
waking my limbs to unaccustomed flight.

I do not ask you always to be right.  
I do not dream all battles will be won.  
And yet, because of you, I bear the sight  
of dead canaries, knowing I am none.


	5. My dot of air is nothing like a line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompted on legionseagle's journal. All apologies to [My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-sun-sonnet-130).

My dot of air is nothing like a line;

Its pilots good or safe, even and odd.

If snow too heavy falls, engines decline;

Fizz buzz, a fruitful jest till they are thaw’d.

I have seen arctic suns set up and down,

And pondered on the happiness of Eve,

Had she but tossed that apple of renown,

Or sought in a warm bath sorrow’s reprieve.

Content to give a bing and get a bong,

Ki-kiri-ki is music meet for me;

With otters warm bedeck’d, I’ll fly along;

And let the world adjudge me scornfully.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any I could seek for at Swiss Air.


End file.
